Saturday, June 9, 2018

83 Years Ago, Soviets Imposed Death Penalty on Anyone Seeking to Flee Abroad

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 9 – Eighty-three years
ago today, on June 9, 1935, the Soviet government made unauthorized flight
across the border of the USSR a capital offense and imposed criminal sanctions
as well on the relatives of anyone who made the attempt.The death penalty for this offense was
dropped after the death of Stalin, but the law remained on the books until 1990.

In reporting this anniversary which
should have called into question Moscow’s claims that the Soviet Union was a
worker’s paradise no one wanted to leave, a Russian news agency says that Moscow
adopted this extreme measure because it was afraid that in the event of famine,
many Soviet citizens would try to flee (calend.ru/event/3693/).

In fact, that did not happen, but
the decision to impose the death penalty for such attempts calls attention to
two things many analysts fail to take into account. On the one hand, the mass
deaths from collectivization in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia, actions that
rose to the level of genocide, genuinely shook the Soviet leadership. And it
decided to act pre-emptively.

And on the other, the Soviet borders
at that time were not well guarded. Many Soviet citizens near them were able to
maintain contact with contrabandists who were in a position to help them escape
the USSR.From Moscow’s perspective, it
was clearly cheaper to threaten the death penalty than to put in place the kind
of Soviet borders that existed most places later.

Not unimportantly, it provided another
charge that could be brought against emigres who had gone abroad without Soviet
permission and was in fact used against those who were forcibly handed over to
Stalin by the Western allies at the end of World War II in what became known as
Operation Keelhaul.